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Remember when you last bought a book, took it home, and found it was only a cover, with a slip of paper inside detailing where to download the missing pages? Or when you bought a CD, played it, and merely heard a brief recording explaining how to grab the tracks online? Of course you don’t. Because both those examples are akin to lunacy. Yet this is the kind of rubbish gamers increasingly have to put up with, due to physical media that sort of isn’t. The latest example: Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Cards.
As outlined in a helpful Nintendo support article, Game-Key Cards are what the name suggests: keys for games rather than games themselves. You get one home, insert it into your console and wait until the game’s data has downloaded. One quick internet handshake later, you finally get to play, and can do so thereafter whenever you like. Well, assuming you don’t lose the card, because though your purchase is essentially a digital game by that point, it won’t run without that little bit of plastic shoved inside your Switch 2.
Nintendo
If you think that sounds absurd, you’re not alone. And although people might jump to Nintendo’s defence and argue this kind of thing is nothing new, or that only a minority of Switch 2 games are initially likely to be sold as Game Key-Cards, that doesn’t mean it’s OK.
I get that there are technical reasons why Game-Key Cards will be a thing on Switch 2. Even boosted card read speeds over the original Switch won’t cope with streaming data from AAA games with graphics so sharp they prick your eyes like a billion needles. But the cynic in me also wants to blast an “O RLY?” in the general direction of Game-Key Card apologists.
After all, I suspect some publishers will be quite happy no longer having to supply an actual entire game on a card. For one thing, lower-capacity cards are cheaper. Also, they’ll know everyone playing will get the latest version of the game, rather than whatever could have shipped on a card. However, Game-Key Cards rob players of that exciting immediacy of slotting in a card and immediately playing. Worse, they eradicate permanence, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned about games that require downloads, the ‘download’ bit is temporary. At some point, servers abruptly vanish.
Nintendon’t
I have a simpler take on Game-Key Cards. Items of physical media should be yours, forever, regardless of technical limitations. The end. Not being so makes a mockery of physical media. Instead, we’ll soon be in a situation where Nintendo would be better off selling plastic cases, which contain nothing more than slips of paper with printed download codes. And where people may make assumptions about the games they buy, only in the future to discover they don’t work. It’s the worst of all worlds, combining the key drawbacks of physical (the risk of losing a card) and digital (no guarantee a game will be accessible forever).
As someone with a drawer full of old carts – playable on consoles old and new – the very concept of Game-Key Cards makes me bristle. While sensible solutions exist, such as including digital licenses with physical purchases, not needing the Game-Key Card once a download’s been verified, and full game backups you can use indefinitely – the pursuit of profits means they’ll never see the light of day. Instead, the future will increasingly find gamers paying more money for less permanence. A terrible deal – except for publishers who’ll relish the prospect of selling us the same games again and again on future consoles while our useless cards gather dust.
Related: My daily life is busy – so the Nintendo Switch 2 is the perfect console for me
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